Where the Arrowheads Meet

A poem founders when the poet assumes the reader was present at the birth of his or her last thought. This is neither uncommon nor abstruse. Because the poet knows the thought so well, he or she assumes the reader will achieve similar levels of intuitive grasp without needing special assistance. The poet, continuing to supply all that has been left out of the poem, all that continues subliminally to tube-feed the contextual nutrients it lacks on the page, assumes the ‘finished piece’ is as easily understood. What is compromised here is the act of communication. The result, all too often, is the birth of an abstract entity, the very opposite of a universe, whereas the organic substance of that universe lives on in the writer’s head, like a kept secret. What struggles for life on the page, in the meantime, is a universe which has too few signposts and too few clearly marked land features; a universe not bound by its own internal laws and logic, one overseen in the camera obscura of the writer’s consciousness, so to speak, but nowhere else. The simplest and yet most important questions remain unanswered. Why here? Why now? Why this person, these people? Why this particular limping universe, and not another? If I say that a poem needs to have sufficient contextualisation to live and to talk its ...continue